Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry (and Everything Else), but Were Afraid to Ask.

May 15, 2010

The Underside of the Universal Leaf

Loren Eiseley, to my mind one of the great essayists and natural philosophers of the twentieth century, told a story in his book, The Firmament of Time (1960):

“In the more obscure scientific circles which I frequent,” he began, “there is a legend circulating about a late distinguished physicist who, in his declining years, persisted in wearing enormous padded boots much too large for him. He had developed, it seems, what to his fellows was a wholly irrational fear of falling through the interstices of that largely empty molecular space which common men in their folly speak of as the world. A stroll across his living-room floor had become, for him, something as dizzily horrendous as the activities of a window washer on the Empire State Building. Indeed, with equal reason he could have passed a ghostly hand through his own ribs.

“The quivering network of his nerves, the awe-inspiring movement of his thought had become a vague cloud of electrons interspersed with the light-year distances that obtain between us and the farther galaxies. This was the natural world which he had helped to create, and in which, at last, he had found himself a lonely and imprisoned occupant. All around him the ignorant rushed on the way over the illusion of substantial floors, leaping, though they did not see it, from particle to particle, over a bottomless abyss. There was even a question as to the reality of the particles which bore them up. It did not, however, keep insubstantial newspapers from being sold, or insubstantial love from being made.”

This is a frightening and forbidding world Mr. Eiseley was telling us about, not at all like the one we are used to of bombs, Fords, lima beans with butter and new clothes for college. Yet it is a world in many ways fitter for contemplation than the one the technician has invented, because at least there is the beginning of perspective again. Mankind is not indispensable, he is only here. There is no guarantee for how long we will survive, nor is our existence very important to the universe, which got along without us for unimaginable periods of “time” (another invention of human beings). The existence of our species is important to nothing but ourselves:

THE UNIVERSAL LEAF

The universe requires that we be born.

As soon as that's been done, it's out to get us.

We become Peter Rabbit in the lettuce

Trying to hide away from Farmer Brown.

Hopelessly we hope we won't be torn

Away, apart.We pray he will forget us,

That he will have some pity once he's met us,

But all such self-delusion is forlorn.

Our hopes and dreams must come at last to grief

If they're not wrecked already, partway through

This span of years.We're well aware that worse

Must come to worst.We cower beneath this leaf

Which we turn over to find what we always knew:

No one cares.Not even the universe.

(Wesli Court in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems;

originally published in the Per Contra Light Verse Supplement 2009.)

Mr. Eiseley continued elsewhere in his prophetic book, “We who are engaged in the life of thought are likely to assume that the key to an understanding of the world is knowledge, both of the past and of the future — that if we had that knowledge we would also have wisdom. It is not my intention to decry learnng. It is only to say that we must come to understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual, and are all the more horrified at those mass movements of terror which have so typified the first half of this [the twentieth] century.”

Wesli Court in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems; originally published in The Formalist.

Both poems are included in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, to be published on September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.

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The Underside of the Universal Leaf

Loren Eiseley, to my mind one of the great essayists and natural philosophers of the twentieth century, told a story in his book, The Firmament of Time (1960):

“In the more obscure scientific circles which I frequent,” he began, “there is a legend circulating about a late distinguished physicist who, in his declining years, persisted in wearing enormous padded boots much too large for him. He had developed, it seems, what to his fellows was a wholly irrational fear of falling through the interstices of that largely empty molecular space which common men in their folly speak of as the world. A stroll across his living-room floor had become, for him, something as dizzily horrendous as the activities of a window washer on the Empire State Building. Indeed, with equal reason he could have passed a ghostly hand through his own ribs.

“The quivering network of his nerves, the awe-inspiring movement of his thought had become a vague cloud of electrons interspersed with the light-year distances that obtain between us and the farther galaxies. This was the natural world which he had helped to create, and in which, at last, he had found himself a lonely and imprisoned occupant. All around him the ignorant rushed on the way over the illusion of substantial floors, leaping, though they did not see it, from particle to particle, over a bottomless abyss. There was even a question as to the reality of the particles which bore them up. It did not, however, keep insubstantial newspapers from being sold, or insubstantial love from being made.”

This is a frightening and forbidding world Mr. Eiseley was telling us about, not at all like the one we are used to of bombs, Fords, lima beans with butter and new clothes for college. Yet it is a world in many ways fitter for contemplation than the one the technician has invented, because at least there is the beginning of perspective again. Mankind is not indispensable, he is only here. There is no guarantee for how long we will survive, nor is our existence very important to the universe, which got along without us for unimaginable periods of “time” (another invention of human beings). The existence of our species is important to nothing but ourselves:

THE UNIVERSAL LEAF

The universe requires that we be born.

As soon as that's been done, it's out to get us.

We become Peter Rabbit in the lettuce

Trying to hide away from Farmer Brown.

Hopelessly we hope we won't be torn

Away, apart.We pray he will forget us,

That he will have some pity once he's met us,

But all such self-delusion is forlorn.

Our hopes and dreams must come at last to grief

If they're not wrecked already, partway through

This span of years.We're well aware that worse

Must come to worst.We cower beneath this leaf

Which we turn over to find what we always knew:

No one cares.Not even the universe.

(Wesli Court in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems;

originally published in the Per Contra Light Verse Supplement 2009.)

Mr. Eiseley continued elsewhere in his prophetic book, “We who are engaged in the life of thought are likely to assume that the key to an understanding of the world is knowledge, both of the past and of the future — that if we had that knowledge we would also have wisdom. It is not my intention to decry learnng. It is only to say that we must come to understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual, and are all the more horrified at those mass movements of terror which have so typified the first half of this [the twentieth] century.”

Wesli Court in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems; originally published in The Formalist.

Both poems are included in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, to be published on September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.